Monday, December 1, 2014

November tends to be a little dim and
dank, but as the month comes to an end, we remember to be grateful for the
abundance we have. And then December
brings all those twinkly little lights, more and more as the month goes on.

In December, Saturn leaves dank,
brooding Scorpio and enters the lively fire sign Sagittarius (for the next two
and a half years). Saturn, as the planet
of limitation and restriction, is never exactly perky, but in Sagittarius,
there’s a stronger sense of possibilities. Sagittarius is about adventure, excitement, passion,
and wider horizons.

Sagittarius brings a broader and more
philosophical way of seeing the world, so it lends itself to community
progress. Saturn was in Sagittarius in
1957, when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and when President Eisenhower sent federal
troops to Arkansas to protect the Little Rock Nine. It was
in Sagittarius when the peace symbol was inaugurated by the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament. It was there when the European Economic
Community, a precursor to the European Union, was founded.

Sagittarius is also a sign of
travel. Saturn was also in Sagittarius
when Jack Kerouac published “On the Road”, Edmund Hillary went to the South
Pole, Sputnik was launched, and the Boeing 707 flew for the first time. Who knows where Saturn in Sagittarius will
take us? Already the rights of
immigrants are in the spotlight, and as the newest wave of immigrants become
more established, the country will grow in innovation, creativity, and
perspective.

This November, we’ve seen continual
lessons around the racial divide in the US, and these have to do with Saturn in
Scorpio’s tendency to dredge up deeply-rooted feelings. But the future of these movements is more
hopeful, thanks to Saturn’s entrance into Sagittarius in December.

The movement in Ferguson was fueled
by immediate outrage but it is taking a long-term perspective. There has been no obvious victory, since the
frightened policeman who killed Michael Brown was not indicted. But that was not really a surprise. And victory is not always obvious.

Real change comes more incrementally
and invisibly, often in actions not taken. Real change is the gun that doesn’t fire, the
camera that records a response that once went undetected, the policeman who learns about unconscious
racism. The Ferguson struggle is just
another chapter in a much larger struggle linking all of us here, one which brings
up some intrinsic questions about our morality as a nation.

Real change comes slowly, and often invisibly,
but it’s still a question of seeing what we haven’t seen before. That’s always the first and most painful
step. The Saturn-in-Scorpio step was
seeing the truth, framed in stark terms of life and death, and the Saturn-in-Sagittarius
step will be incorporating what we’ve learned into a new social
philosophy.

And so white people in the U.S. have
seen some new truths. They’ve thought
about what it’s like for the parents of an African-American teenage boy,
walking down the street in any American city.
First they saw it with Trayvon Martin, and then with Michael Brown. It might’ve been easy to disown Zimmerman’s
actions, to see him as an overzealous anomaly.
It’s not so easy to disown a policeman, paid by the government to do its
work, protected by the government in the end.

There could be quite a few
confrontations in December, and confrontation can bring even more clarity. This month, we experience the sixth exact pass
of the revolutionary aspect that began in 2011:
the Uranus/Pluto square.

There is an eager lunging towards
change these days. We can taste our
desire for it. People are imagining
change, creating a wide spectrum of new scenarios that match their
fantasies. I’m doing it too, and in my
world, there’s peer pressure but no coercion, anger but little violence, and
sadness but rarely desolation. But there
are other visions, a multitude of them, some very much at odds with mine.

As I get older, I think: small steps are okay, as long as they’re in
the right direction. But the Uranus/Pluto
square is not about small steps. It’s lightning-abrupt, powerful, and
definite.

Uranus and Pluto are both about
change. Uranus is about novelty,
innovation, vibration, electricity, radical social movements, and scientific progress. It’s represented on our screens these days as
a huge robotic, armor-clad hero, supported by up-to-the-minute technology.

Science is in a combative pose these
days, but still, there are no angry Luddites in the streets. Nobody is suggesting that we do away with
technology, even the conservatives who think the Bible is the last word on
everything, and that the earth was created 6000 years ago, and that we never
actually went to the moon. They still
want their own tools - their cars and
computers and factory equipment - to be modern and efficient. They haven’t become Amish. So it’s not that science is being wiped out,
but that people keep trying to shackle it – as they’ve done so often through
the centuries, often in the name of the church.

So enter
Uranus in Aries. It’s science fighting to be free. It’s truth, burning for liberty. And it has its hero myth, since scientists
know they have an important role in rescuing the earth from the upcoming crisis. Science has sullied air and water, but
science can save them. The danger is
that science can identify too much with its hero mythos, seeing itself as
Superman instead of fallible and human.

And what is this high-tech robot
fighting? On the other side of the ring,
there’s Pluto in Capricorn. Pluto is
slow, buried power, and it’s much harder to show on the movie screens. It’s the Shadow. It’s the black-and-white mystery film with
its twitching suspense. And it’s in
Capricorn, the sign of structure, tradition and formality, where it’s
especially cold. Think old stone
walls. Think crystal skyscrapers going
up to the sky. Think the quiet, intricate
hierarchies of corporate finance.

Pluto moves slowly, more slowly than
any other planet, and yet it has to do with major transformation. That’s because the power of transformation is
underneath everything. Everything
falls.

So Uranus wants the structure to fall
immediately, right now, and Pluto is basically telling it, “Wait, child. It will all be gone, and there will be
something else in its place.” Who knows
what that will be? Pluto will be
Capricorn for nine more years, and in that time, we could all become vassals of
the Chinese. Maybe we should be paying a
lot more attention to the struggle that’s going on in Hong Kong.

What is our path to wisdom in all
this? We have the momentum, when it
comes to Uranus in Aries. But we need to
channel our anger, our urge for freedom, and our scientific know-how. To me, that says that enlightenment should be
our goal. We need to enlighten ourselves
and each other, to be willing to see what we haven’t seen before.

And when it comes to Pluto in
Capricorn, it’s also about listening.
There is some rumbling deep, deep underground. We may not be standing on this earth anymore
when it reaches the surface. But we
may. And if we are here, it may be there’s
no technique or tool that will save us.
But there may be. And it may be
that today’s freedom fighters are the ones honing the tools, teaching people to
understand what’s all around us.